Nutjitsu puts you in the furry shoes of a ninja squirrel, your goal throughout the game is to gather acorns and avoid guards to score points. In practice this is more like a fan made version of Pacman, only without the personality.
At the start of each mission you will be tasked with either gathering a specific colour of acorn, a certain amount of them or to spend a predetermined amount of time in a specific are of each map. The gameplay is pretty repetitive and the maps do very little to incorporate diversity into the game.
The enemy types are slightly more varied with standard enemies that will wander about at random, fast dashing enemies that will move about the map at speed and other enemies with effects like leaving a poisonous trail that will slow you down if you walk over it. Enemies will see a short trail that you leave behind you as you move through the maps, it would be nice if they actually saw YOU, but that isn’t the case. It is a nice mechanic and means that you have to think ahead in your movements as to not alert an enemy nearby.
You can purchase and use items, these will usually allow you to escape an enemy once you have been seen. These are bought through the in-game store with coins gained from completing the levels. While these don’t have any real offensive capabilities, it is worth having some handy for when you get cornered. There are multiple difficulty settings that will alter the game from being very casual to rather hectic and very challenging. Higher difficulties will earn you more points but you will have to contend with more enemies.
There’s not a huge selection of maps and the levels are too similar in layout to offer much interest after the first few missions. There is a survival mode where you can keep playing a map until you inevitably die. As time ticks by more enemies will appear on the screen, this is fun the first time you play but once again I lost interest fairly quickly.
The aesthetic of Nutjitsu is nothing to scream about. The animations are very two-dimensional and it lacks the charm and pizazz of Pacman, the game that Nutjitsu wishes it was. There are no real character animations in the game and the character models would look more at home in a flash game than on a console. The menus are pretty basic and have no real flair, I can’t say that this game stands out at all from almost any other pacman / bomberman clone you can download on your mobile for free.
The music is so dull and repetitive you will be happy when you die and it stops (I have programmed better music on an old Nokia 3210). For some reason the enemy squirrel ninjas will bark when they see you and that’s really the only other audio except a popping sound when you die. Looking at the positives, the sound is clear but thoroughly underwhelming.
Nutjitsu is incredibly repetitive. Sure it will change some of the objectives, sometimes you need to gather certain colours of acorn, other times it can be any colour and in some games you will have to loiter in a certain area for a set amount of time. In the end the game shows you everything it has in the first ten minutes of play and then proceeds to shove it down your throat. You can replay levels for higher scores and try it on harder difficulties but realistically there’s no cause to go back to this once you put the controller down.
If this was an Android or IOS game then I could see the appeal. It’s a time killer of sorts however on a console it’s simply not worth the price tag. It clocks in at $6.49 but you can get a game of equal or greater value for free elsewhere.
